Seeing Da Vinci, thinking ‘Total Art’

To understand and experience the painting, you need to establish a good eye-contact with Mona Lisa. You’ll never succeed, for although she is looking in your direction she is not exactly looking at you. Try as much as you can, but you’ll never know what it is that has earned her transfixed gaze. But the very act of trying to establish eye-contact with her soon grows into a kind of soul-contact. For Mona Lisa, a personification of beauty, purity and graceful poise, begins to come alive, with all the mystery of love and life. The moment of seeing can go on into eternity. Or hasn’t the artist captured eternity itself into a moment in the life of his muse? The almost evanescent smile on her face is enigmatic. What does it mean? The meaning lies in the mind of the beholder. For me it was the magic of how I forgot my rushed journey, along with my 14-year-old daughter, to the museum through the Champs-Elysees avenue, which was swarming with tourists, and forgot too the crowds milling around the painting itself, and stood self-absorbed in front of a great work of art.

Although Maharshi Aurobindo has written the following lines about how to appreciate Indian art, I think that they are entirely applicable to the sublime works of western art. ‘‘It is essential that we should look here not solely with the physical eye informed by the reason and the aesthetic imagination, but make the physical seeing a passage to the opening of the inner spiritual eye and a moved communion in the soul. A great oriental work of art does not easily reveal its secret to one who comes to it solely in a mood of aesthetic curiosity or with a considering critical objective mind, still less as the cultivated and interested tourist passing among strange and foreign things; but it has to be seen in loneliness, in the solitude of one’s self, in moments when one is capable of long and deep meditation and as little weighted as possible with the conventions of material life.’’

Europe gives almost limitless opportunities for such meditative enjoyment of art—from da Vinci to Vincent Van Gogh. Stand beneath the intricately frescoed dome of St Peter’s Basilica, designed by Michelangelo, in the Vatican City and you are filled not only with a sense of awe at its proportions—136 metres high and built 460 years ago—but also with a deep feeling of reverence. It’s the same feeling as you enter this largest church in the world and stand in front of the Pieta, a white-marble sculpture which depicts the body of Jesus in the arms of Mary after the Crucifixion. Hailed as ‘‘a miracle wrought from a once shapeless stone’’, Michelangelo sculpted this when he was not even 25.

He turns you into a state of speechlessness yet again when you enter the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican museum, and stand beneath the gigantic fresco on its high vault. Here Michelangelo develops the biblical theme from the Original Sin to Redemption. In the Creation of Adam, perhaps the most famous of his paintings, the divine finger reaches out to meet with that of the first man in whom God instills life. To me this painting is emblematic of every contact with great art—be it in the spiritual setting of a Hindu temple, a Muslim mosque, a Christian church or even in the ‘‘secular’’ setting of a good museum. In each such artistic and spiritually uplifting experience, we reach out to something transcendent, and the transcendent in turn reaches out to us. Hasn’t Leonardo da Vinci himself said, ‘‘Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.’’

‘‘Human hands alone cannot build such things,’’ is what I said to Father Felix Machado, a senior official in the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, as we came out of the church into St Peter’s Square, which is designed as a magnificent elliptical colonnade by Bernini and from where the people have a darshan of the Pope. ‘‘Yes,’’ replied the kind priest who hails from Mumbai, ‘‘God has inspired humans to create these great works of art. But we must remember that human hands have also produced a lot of evil in history.’’

Artistic magnificence of a different kind is on display at Versailles in Paris. If the Vatican glorifies God, Versailles glorifies the King. Created mainly by Louis IV 350 years ago, this is the world’s largest palace set in vast landscaped gardens and groves. The palace has now been turned into a museum of utmost grandeur. But art resides not only in the paintings, sculptures and furniture exhibited in hundreds of its halls. Rather, the whole of Versailles is in itself a holistic work of art. In the words of Jacques Thuiller, a French art scholar, it represents the concept of ‘Total Art’. ‘‘It is an art in which all the art forms accept to participate, in which each art form accepts to relinquish its own particular sublimity, born of a general accord. Each object concedes its perfection to the whole, and its beauty to the perfection of an instant in time. Those present are aware of the magic being wrought. They are no longer contemplating a masterpiece from the outside: what they are experiencing is in itself a work of art.’’

I go back to Aurobindo, who captures the concept of ‘Total Art’ in a different but complementary way. ‘‘Architecture, sculpture and painting, because they are the three great arts which appeal to the spirit through the eye, are also those in which the sensible and the invisible meet with the strongest emphasis on themselves and yet the greatest necessity of each other. The form with its insistent masses, proportions, lines, colours, can here only justify them by their service for the something intangible it has to express; the spirit needs all the possible help of the material body to interpret itself to itself through the eye, yet asks of it that it shall be as transparent a veil as possible of its own greater significance.’’

How artistically, almost mystically, expressed by an Indian yogi. But when I think of how badly we in India are maintaining our own artistic heritage, of instance after instance of the criminal callousness with which we are letting many of our museums and archives go to seed, my pride in ‘Mera Bharat Mahan’ gets a big jolt. The original land of ‘Total Art’ is today guilty of near-total neglect of its artistic treasure. Surely, we need to learn many lessons from Europeans on how to preserve and promote art.

write to sudheen.kulkarni@expressindia.com